Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Zurich Axioms is a book about managing risk and reward. Twelve Axioms define how
to think about risk and uncertainty in such a way that you’re more likely to be rewarded
than not.
“Everbody wants to win, of course. But not everybody wants to bet, and therein lies a
difference of the greatest magnitude. Many people, probably most, want to win without
betting.”
The idea is to deliberately expose yourself to risk — to bet — in a way that gains are more
likely than losses.
Axiom #1 on Risk: “Worry is not a sickness but a sign of health. If you’re not worried, you
are not risking enough.”
Most people strive for a “sleep well at night” portfolio because it offers security. The
Axioms propose the opposite. Worry is part of an adventurous life, one that takes personal
risks. Put another way, an adventurous life is a rich life. A life avoiding worry is boring or
poor. Managing money is no different. To get rich, you must take risks. The price of risk is
a state of worry.
Frank Henry (author’s father) rule of thumb: only spend half your energy toward job
income, spend the other half on investment/speculation.
“Every occupation has its aches and pains. If you keep bees, you get stung. Me, I get
worried. It’s either that or stay poor. If I’ve got a choice between worried and poor, I’ll take
worried anytime.” — Jesse Livermore
Minor Axiom #1: “Always play for meaningful stakes.”
“Meaningful stakes” does not mean taking a huge risk that a loss would drive you to
bankruptcy. It means taking a big enough risk, with favorable odds, that produces a
significant difference. If the bet is small enough that a loss won’t matter, any gain won’t
matter either. The bet should be one where a loss is enough to worry about while a gain is
financially significant.
J. Paul Getty, after betting his entire fortune ($500 in 1916) on his first oil lease that hit big,
remarked: “Of course, I was lucky. I could have lost. But even if I had, that wouldn’t have
changed my conviction that I was right to take the chance. By taking the chance — a pretty
big chance, I’ll admit — I gave myself the possibility of getting somewhere interesting. The
possibility, the hope, you see. If I’d refused to take the chance, I would not have had the
hope… So it seemed to me I had a lot more to win than lose. If I won, it would be various
kinds of wonderful. If I lost, it would hurt, but not all that much. The right course of action
seemed clear. What would you have done?”
Minor Axiom #2: “Resist the allure of diversification.”
Diversification: “As used in the investment community, it means spreading your money
around. Spreading it thin. Putting it into a lot of little speculations instead of a few big
ones.”
Diversification reduces risk but can be taken to a point that reduces any chance of
significant reward.
3 Flaws: Being too diversified means violating the “always play for meaningful stakes”
axiom, more likely to see any gains and losses offset each other (like running in place),
and rather than too many eggs in one basket, you have too many baskets to watch over
and not enough time to do so.
Peter Lynch called it diworsification: “Don’t diversify just for the sake of diversity. You then
become like a contestant in a supermarket shopping contest, in which the object is to fill
your basket fast. You go home with a lot of expensive junk you don’t really want. In
speculation, you should put your money into ventures that genuinely attract you, and only
those. Never buy something simply because you think you need it to round out a
‘diversified portfolio.'”
Axiom #3 on Hope: “When the ship starts to sink, don’t pray. Jump.”
Expect things to go wrong from time to time, and have a plan for when it does. That means
expect mistakes, expect bad luck, expect to be wrong about investments, but don’t let any
of it debilitate your ability to invest. When it does happen, learn to cut your losses. To do
that, you must be willing to take a loss.
“You take small losses to protect your self from big ones.”
“In the absence of compelling reasons to think things will get better, sell.”
Three obstacles stop people from cutting their losses early:
Fear of regret: taking the loss, only to watch it recover, and miss out on the recovery.
Recoveries will happen but not very often or quickly enough to wait. Investments gone bad
often have problems that “are slow to develop and slow to go away.”
Too painful: Avoiding the pain of taking a loss, by holding, and hoping, to break even. By
avoiding the pain, you also avoid other opportunities that could get you back to even
sooner. No rule states that you must make your money back the same way you lost it.
Admitting you’re wrong: “Refusing to be wrong is the wrongest response of them all.”
Protecting your ego is a foolish reason to lose a pile of money. Markets humble everyone.
Expect it to happen to you.
Minor Axiom #4: “Accept small losses… Expect to experience several while awaiting a
large gain.”
Small losses “are part of the cost of speculation. They buy you the right to hope for big
gains.”
Axiom #9 on Optimism and Pessimism: “Optimism means expecting the best, but
confidence means knowing how you will handle the worst. Never make a move if you are
merely optimistic.”
Blind optimism gets you in trouble because it ignores the odds, thinking luck will win out. A
healthy sense of pessimism reminds you of the odds, so you can be ready for the worst.
“You can beat the odds once in a while but not consistently. Usually, if the odds say you’ve
got a loser, it’s a loser. The pro, knowing this, and knowing how easily the optimistic sucker
can be persuaded to bet when he shouldn’t, gets rich. The pro doesn’t have optimism.
What he has is confidence. Confidence springs from the constructive use of pessimism…
Seek confidence instead. Confidence comes not from expecting the best, but from
knowing how you will handle the worst.”
Every bet has numerous possible outcomes but we’re drawn to the one that works out
best. That’s the point of betting, right? So optimism, hoping for the best, is a normal state
of mind and it feels better too. But it’s out of control optimism which dooms investors.
Some amount of worry helps keep it under control by thinking about alternate outcomes,
allowing you to prepare if things go wrong.
Axiom #11 on Stubbornness: “If it doesn’t pay off the first time, forget it.”
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” is a nice idiom but pouring good money after
bad into a bad investment out of a stubborn refusal to quit is stupid. It’s an emotional
response driven by a need to break even or be proven right.
Minor Axiom #15: “Never try to save a bad investment by averaging down.”
Averaging down may lower your cost basis, but a lower cost basis in a bad investment is
still a loss, likely made worse. If you wouldn’t put new money into an investment — having
never owned it — at the fallen price, then don’t average down. Accept the loss. Sell. Make
it back in another opportunity.
Axiom #12 on Planning: “Long-range plans engender the dangerous belief that the future
is under control. It is important never to take your own long-range plans, or other people’s,
seriously.”
Plans have a way of adding order to chaos by ignoring the unexpected. The further you
look out, the more unknowable things become.
“What all these hopeful planners either fail to recognize or choose to ignore is that the
money world is only in a limited sense like a tree growing. It is ridiculous to think you can
see the world’s future simply by looking at trends in evidence today. Some of those trends
will undoubtedly peter out or reverse themselves in the next twenty years. Nobody knows
which ones. Whole new trends will spring into existence, factors that nobody today even
dreams of. Unknowable events will take us by surprise. Booms and busts, upheavals,
wars, crashes and collapses: who knows what we have ahead of us?… The only kind of
preparation I can make for the next century, therefore, is to continue studying the market,
to go on learning and improving… Resolve to learn all you can learn about the kinds of
speculation that attract you, but don’t ever lose sight of the probability – no, let’s say the
certainty – that your speculative media and the circumstances affecting them are going to
change in ways you cannot now imagine.”
Minor Axiom #16: “Shun long-term investments.”
The advantage of long-term investments is it removes tough decisions. There’s one: buy it
and wait. Except the future is not guaranteed to reflect the past. It’s unknowable. Expect
the unexpected. Expect things to go wrong. Be nimble enough, when things do go wrong,
to avoid financial catastrophe.
“All you can know about the future is that it will get here when it gets here. You cannot see
its shape, but at least you can prepare yourself to react to its opportunities and hazards.
There is no sense in just standing there and letting it roll over you.”